Need advice on making a JButton

Question

hey guys, ive created a couple of gui's before using JButtons and using actionlistener to see which button was pressed based on the name of the button. this time im making buttons using a image and the button contains properties were as my previous buttons were just to sort, very easy compared to this time. basically my JButton is going to have 2 or more properties such as name, location etc.. . so if the user picked image 1, i can call getName or get Location based on the button they pressed and print it out on my text area. from what i was told i can make a class to extend JButton and have my Place object in that class. is this the easiest way to have 5 or more JButtons each with the same properties but different info, or is there an easier way?
btw with having Strings as a button i can do
command.equals("Sort") to have it sort
but since its an image does it work the same way if i put in the image name command.equals("image.gif")?
thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Ok, if i got your problem right i think i've got the solution for you. What you are trying to do is to identify from which button the action came from, right? And you used to use strings to identify them, but now you've only got a picture on some.
You need to think a little bit different.
Something like this:
JButton b1 = new JButton("Hi!");
JButton b2 = new JButton("How are you?");
JButton b3 = new JButton(new ImageIcon("image.gif"));
public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) {
if(e.getSource() == b1) {
        //Do something
if (e.getSource() == b2) {
  //Do something else
if (e.getSource() == b3) {
  //Do a third thing
}As you can see, i only used the JButton variables (b1,b2 & b3) to identify the buttons. In this way, you never need to worry about the content of the different buttons! This is much better, just think what else to do if you have two buttons with the same text on them!